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Friday, January 11, 2013

" When I use a word, "Humpty Dumpty said," in
rather a scornful tone, "it means just what I choose it to mean -- neither
more nor less."

Alice
in Wonderland's Through the Looking-Glass

The new movie, "Zero Dark Thirty" has opened in
theatres near you and certain folks in Washington
are having a cow.Seems that the movie,
a retelling of the hunt for, finding and killing of Osama bin Laden suggests
that it was "torture" that gave the CIA the needed information that
led to bin Laden; No waterboarding, no bin Laden.

That had been the Republican storyline from Creepy Veep
Cheney who, you could just tell, was all a-tingle when he growlingly announced,
like some cheap-suited gunsel, that sometimes it was necessary to go to the
"dark side." Heh-heh.He and
his PNAC NeoCon cronies were all thrilled with the Jack Bauer "24"
macho-man idea of torture and had their own manicured, soft handed Justice
Department lawyers parsing out and approving each and every "medically
supervised" turn of the screw.And,
now, like very bad pennies, and despite having history proved them so wrong on so many levels, this same
gang of Zombies are still turning up on the Sunday Yak-Yak Shows to defend
their appalling record on torture and again flog their old, failed PNAC (Bomb,
Bomb, Bomb Iran)
schemes. Which always prompts my hollered query, "Can't talk-TV find
anyone else but these wrong-headed dinosaurs?"

Well, apparently not.As far as the media is concerned, even Republican idea men who stopped
evolving in the 10th century and are stuck in re-run mode are apparently the only guest on the right they can find.So we keep getting one endless rerun ofout-of-date Republican Pax Americana with a gun.And a waterboard.

Meanwhile, Democrats are also having a cow. Senate
Intelligence Committee Democrats have always contended that torture didn't
work, that "no significant information" about the courier, the key
link to bin Laden, came from detainees after they were subjected to
torture.Oh, excuse me, "coercive
techniques."They maintain that
information about bin-Laden's courier came from a detainee before he was
tortured.Pardon, I meant to say, "subjected to coercive interrogation
techniques." And that the movie gives a totally false picture of what
really happened.Furthermore, Senator
Dianne Feinstein, chairwoman of the Intelligence Committee, is demanding that
senior CIA official, Michael Morell, who acted as a consultant on the film, 'splain himself for a message he sent to CIA
employees that "some information" leading to the Al Qaeda chief "came from detainees subjected to
enhanced techniques."

Because, lurking in the middle of all this is an
interesting, unarguable fact:One
unknown man, one unknown name -- bin Laden's courier -- turned out to be the
one tiny key that lay in plain sight for years, yet turned out to be the one
who unlocked the door to bin Laden's compound.

Which allows Feinstein and others on the Intelligence
Committee to claim that "no significant information about the courier came
from detainees after they were subjected to coercive techniques" because
"the detainee who provided crucial
information about the courier in 2004, identified by U.S.
officials as Hassan Ghul, did so before he was subjected to coercive
interrogation techniques.He was never
waterboarded." All of which lands Mr. Morell in hot water and the
defenders of torture on the hot seat.

So there we sit.Did
torture work? Or did it hinder and delay? No? Yes? And in the middle of it all, weasel-wording Humpty
Dumpty and the meaning of the word "torture" and "enhanced
interrogation techniques." And what, if anything, does
"significant" mean, anyway?

In his extraordinary book, "The Looming Tower; al-Qaeda
and the Road to 9/11," Lawrence Wright made one heartbreaking, furious, frustrating
fact very clear: In tracking bin-Laden and al-Qaeda, everything was both
significant and insignificant at the same time. Information is information.And whether information that is obtained by
torture will turn out to be "significant" or "insignificant'
can't be known until after the fact.

Which means that spook-hunters have to be jigsaw puzzle
experts, tapestry-weavers,psychics,
psychologists, sly and subtle master interrogators andtime-travelers, moving magically into the
future on a thread from the past.

Or they rely hard slogging grunt-work, or on sheer dumb
luck, or both -- one needle stumbled upon in a painstakingly sifted haystack.Or not found, and because not found, the twin
towers fall and thousands die.

And so we're left with war crimes on America's
books, with only low level prosecutions completed, thereby assuring that no one
in high office will be held to account
because America
is always conveniently in need of "moving on."And the only question left is, are we still
enhancing our interrogations?

Ina drone and
spook-filled world engaged in limitless war-by-any-other-name, who knows?I certainly don't, do you?

2 comments:

How is the Movie?I am more concerned with the loss of the other substantial lessons of Iraq, Lebanon, Afghanistan, Russian ruled Afghanistan, Los Osos, Vietnam, and Iraq than I am with the specific effectiveness of torture techniques (or the moral implications of their use). Terrorist Cells operate as cells for a reason, so that individuals rarely access that much. I haven't read the looming tower but noticed it's publication date as '07. I see it has critical acclaim.This book -http://www.amazon.com/bin-Laden-Man-Declared-America/dp/0761535810/ref=la_B001IOBL1Y_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1357955062&sr=1-1was first published two years before 9/11 and contains pretty much all of the background material noted in the 9/11 commission report. All of which was available and very predictable, and none of which had an "Iraq" involvement. It also makes it very clear that the existence of the anti terrorism group that was tracking Bin Ladin Prior to 9/11 was hanging by a budgetary thread. Years later, there was a specific Bush White house press release that stated that Bin Ladin was no longer in the Pakistan pashtun badlands area. An obvious lie. Ironically, they may had been correct, but he was only about a hundred miles southeast. Years after that -? The Carl Roveization of Valerie Plume.

Realizing that in this democracy, a substantial group still think 9/11 had something to do with Iraq is torture enough for me.

Alon. Think you'd enjoy "The Looming Tower." It really is effective in showing how needle-in-a-haystack this all is and how many close calls, those sickening moments when the good guys almost caught the bad guys, often missing my minutes. As for the lessons learned, I'm not sure anybody learns anything from anything. We just keep repeating the same blunders over and over.

Calhouns Can(n)ons

About the Can(n)ons

Calhoun's Can(n)ons was originally published in 1990 in the (now defunct) Morro Bay, CA, Sun Bulletin, and since 1992 has continued in the various resurrections of the Los Osos, CA. Bay News, Bay Breeze, Bay News, Bay News-Tolosa Press. A few years ago, the Can(n)on was added to the Central Coast NewsMission blogsite. Ann Calhoun lives in Los Osos. You can email her at Churadogs at gmail dot com

To be persuasive, we must be believable. To be believable, we must be credible. To be credible, we must be truthful. Edward R. Murrow

It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; the essential is invisible to the eye.Antoine de Saint-ExuperyThe Little Prince

No one is exempt from talking nonsense; the misfortune is to do it solemnly. Montaigne